"'We have a theoretical idea that you must be dwelling, as we commonly
hear it said, with a volcano under your feet. Very many regard your
slaves as a race of noble spirits, conscious of wrong, and burning with
suppressed indignation, which is ready to break out at every chance.
They think of you at the North as having guns and pistols and spears all
about you, ready for use at any moment. But when I spend a night at your
plantations, the owner and I the only white males, the wife and seven or
eight young children having us for their only defenders against the
seventy or hundred blacks, who are all about us in the quarters, the
idea of danger has really never occurred to me; because my knowledge of
the people has previously disarmed me of fear.'
"'Emissaries, white and black,' said a planter, 'can, make us trouble;
but my belief is that we could live here to the end of time with these
colored people, and be subject to fewer cases of insubordination by far
than your corporations at the North suffer from in strikes. Your people,
generally, have no proper idea of the black man's nature. God seems to
have given him docility and gentleness, that he may be a slave till the
time comes for him to be something else.
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